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Sony: The Ghost of Christmas Past

By Sam Grobart November 5, 2010 12:58 pmNovember 5, 2010 12:58 pm

Sony’s first Walkman, one of many products the company used to entrance young children around the holidays.

When I was a kid (around 25 years ago), Christmas was a time of family, food and the searing-hot hope that I would be in possession of some new gadget come the morning of Dec. 25. And no matter what that gadget was, it was likely to have one common feature: The name “Sony” printed somewhere on it.

There was an almost-endless supply of products that I would have been entranced by from the Japanese electronics company. Anything else was off-brand, not worthy of consideration. Panasonic? Even they were second-rate at the time. LG? Those guys were called Lucky-Goldstar back then, which sounded less like like the name of a electronics company and more like the name of a “dancer” at a “gentlemen’s cabaret.” But Sony? Oh Sony… they could do no wrong. To list just a few Sony products I used to pine for:

Contrast that with today. I can’t honestly think of something I would want this holiday season that comes from Sony. TVs? Sony’s still in the game, but they used to own that market. Now they have to slug it out with Samsung, LG, Vizio, Panasonic… the list goes on.

Sony still makes a good still camera or two, but that too is a market with plenty of competition (Canon, Nikon, Casio, Panasonic, et al).

Cellphones? Lots of news from Apple, Microsoft, Google, even R.I.M. But SonyEricsson? Crickets.

E-book readers? It makes those — it made the first ones — but you hear more about Amazon’s Kindle or even Barnes & Noble’s Nook.

Portable audio? Well, let’s not get into that, now, because that’s just mean.

Nowadays, the holiday season’s more a time when Sony announces not so much a new product, but some new restructuring plan that will finally — finally! — restore the company to its lofty heights.

I mean, I get it. Things change. People move on. I certainly did. Nowadays, my holiday shopping takes me to the shiny white cubes of Apple stores, or the Web sites of Samsung, Panasonic or others. Will my heart ever quicken at another product from Sony? It could, but that’s really up to them.

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